The Real Never Trump Campaign

Donald Trump’s political opponents, both Republican and Democrat, have focussed on criticizing him for his vulgarity, rather than any deeper aspect of his policies or persona.

Photograph by Steven Senne / AP

Last week in Palm Beach, Donald Trump’s campaign adviser Paul Manafort gave a presentation to Republican National Committee members on how the candidate would make himself less toxic in a general election, and someone leaked a tape of the proceedings to the Washington Post__. In the primaries Trump had been “playing a part,” Manafort assured his audience, and he would play a different one in the general. That got the headlines. But Manafort said something else interesting, too. Trump’s problems, he claimed, were only matters of “personality.” Hillary Clinton’s ran deeper, to “character.” Fixing personality issues “is a lot easier,” according to Manafort. “You can’t change somebody’s character, but you can change the way a person presents himself.”

From a certain perspective—that, for instance, of Democratic opposition researchers—one strange thing about the Republican primary was how narrow the attacks on Trump were, how prim and how fussy. A “bully,” Ted Cruz called him. “A phony, a fraud,” Mitt Romney said. “The most vulgar person to ever aspire to the Presidency,” Marco Rubio announced. Aside from a short flurry of attention around the scams of Trump University, this was the approach. The most vocal members of the anti-Trump faction wanted these lines to be much harsher. The candidates needed to start saying that Trump was “a ridiculous person,” Stuart Stevens, the senior strategist for Romney in 2012, told me. In other words, Manafort was on to something: Even when Trump’s most committed opponents voiced the attack ads of their dreams, it was at the level of personality. A winning campaign would have to cut deeper.

During the primaries, there were some stories that went to the matter of character, often having to do with Trump’s treatment of African-Americans, but they mostly seemed slip through the news. There was the reminder of the 1973 federal lawsuit that accused Trump Management, which was run by Donald Trump, of marking African-Americans’ rental applications with a “C,” for Colored, and rejecting them. (The company settled the lawsuit in 1975.) There was Trump's recent refusal, on live television, to disavow the support of the Ku Klux Klan. There was the story of a bus driver named Kip Brown, which Nick Paumgarten recounted while reporting on Atlantic City’s decline:

Brown also used to work in the casinos, at the Showboat, bussing tables, and at Trump’s Castle, stripping and waxing floors. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” he said. “It was the eighties, I was a teen-ager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back.”

In the primary campaign, Trump’s opponents had a strategic problem that created a tactical one. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush all claimed that Trump was not a true conservative, that he had no part in their shared political tradition. Their aim, at least at first, was to attack him from the right, to insist that his positions could not be easily distinguished from Hillary Clinton’s. But this meant that their largely inflammatory rhetoric about the threat posed by migrants left them little room to attack Trump’s more inflammatory rhetoric about migrants, and that their disregard for the scientific consensus on global warming approximated his. Perhaps Trump’s reality-show persona may have helped guide the other candidates’ arguments to the surface matter of his vulgarity, rather than to anything deeper, but then they too were compromised on the matters where he was most vulnerable. When it came to his history of disrespect for women and minorities, they could offer only the language of decorum.

Now that the first Democratic attack ads on Trump are starting to roll out, Trump’s vulnerability in the general election is becoming clearer. Conner Eldridge, a long-shot Democratic Senate candidate in Arkansas, released a two-minute Web ad attacking Trump’s misogyny. “She ate like a pig,” Trump says in one clip, on Larry King’s set. “I’d look her right in that fat ugly face of hers,” he says in the next. “He once sent her a picture of herself with the words, ‘The face of a dog,’ ” Anderson Cooper says, over an image of Trump. This material is familiar—most of it did surface during the primary campaign—but Eldridge’s ad begins by displaying a single word: Harassment. That word lends a different lens to everything that follows. We are no longer in the realm of personality—the problem isn’t Trump’s impropriety. Harassment is an indictment of character.

These distinctions—between how a conservative can attack Trump and how a progressive can, between questions of character and of personality—go some way toward explaining the mixed reactions to Hillary Clinton’s first attacks on Trump. Her campaign’s first ad against the mogul featured leading Republican politicians condemning Trump in the same terms they had during the primary campaign; during her own press interviews, Clinton kept calling Trump a “loose cannon,” which also seemed to be on the level of personality. “Don’t blow this,” Alex Pareene of Gawker titled his post on how the Democrats should spin their anti-Trump campaign. But the Clinton team released a second ad this week, which showed clips of Trump talking about policy. “I will get rid of gun-free zones in schools,” he says, from behind a podium. Reading from a script, he promises “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Trump argues that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. When he is asked to denounce David Duke, he says, “I don’t know anything about white supremacists.” The power of the ad was that it was not concerned with Trump as a person, but with the more serious business of what he’d be like as a President.

Paul Manafort was shrewd to distinguish between personality and character, but it only takes a shift in perspective—from that of a Republican primary voter to that of a general-election voter—to turn one into the other. The attacks are going to cut deeper. They are also likely to be more precise, given the state of micro-targeting and the Clinton campaign’s ability to pay for it: A catalogue of Trump’s disregard for science will likely greet voters with environmental interests, and a recounting of his ugly history on race will surely be presented to African-American voters. The business of opposition research is politics at its most unleashed and gleeful. In this campaign it may also be politics at its most effective. Poking holes in Trump’s persona and his politics shouldn’t be hard.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells began contributing to The New Yorker in 2006 and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2015. He writes mainly about American politics and society.